


delete the kisses

by lilyjpotter



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M, Gen, Modern AU, Multi, childhood friends to lovers trope
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-29
Updated: 2017-08-29
Packaged: 2018-12-21 08:34:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,330
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11940360
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lilyjpotter/pseuds/lilyjpotter
Summary: *shows up at ur house wearing a pizza hut uniform* someone ordered a childhood friends to lovers trope??





	delete the kisses

They meet at the service station at 3:00am on a Saturday night, 3:00am on a Sunday morning.

He doesn’t really expect to see her there, wearing an oversized Athletics jumper from a school she never went to for a sport she never played, her hair piled in a messy knot on top of her head, with deer-print baby-blue pyjamas bottoms on her legs (his heart does a 180°, like it’s turning around to face the sun) and ugg boots on her feet.

It’s a far cry from the last time he saw her, when they were both 13. She had two rows of braces, hair in pigtails, considerably more freckles than she has now and a sizeable spot on her chin.

“Evans?” he says, vaguely aghast. He has two plastic bags in one hand and a platinum credit card in the other.

She’s leaning against the counter. When he says her name—her  _last_  name, as if he’s ever called her anything else—she turns to look at him, frowning, pushing off the edge where the rows of mints are stacked right in front of the tobacco cupboard, walking over to him and carefully avoiding the choice stains on the carpet, one of which might be vomit. He doesn’t think about this. “Potter?’ she says.

It’s been so long since he’s heard his name in her mouth (he doesn’t think about this, either). He wastes no time. “What the fuck are you doing here?”

She just raises an eyebrow, answers immediately, unflinchingly.  _God, she’s exactly how he remembers her._  “I was baking a cake at 3am on a Saturday night—“  _it’s Sunday morning_ , “and ran out of baking soda. What the fuck are  _you_  doing here?”

He holds up the two plastic bags by of answer, aluminium foil, blue hairspray, frozen yogurt in one and an assortment of hats and wigs in the other. “Midnight raid.”

She appraises the bags. He pretends she’s appraising him. It’s been a little over six years since he’s seen her. “I see.”

“What the fuck are you doing baking a cake at 3am on a Saturday night?”  _Sunday morning,_  he reminds himself.

The eyebrow again.  _Fuck, where did she learn to do that? Or,_ when _?_  “The fuck are you doing buying—“ another glance at the multicoloured and highly offensive afro wig sticking out of the top of the second bag, ‘wigs and hats at 3am on a Saturday night?”  _Sunday morning._

He just grins at her, floppy and lopsided and much like the way he did the last time he saw her. He remembers that school quad too well. She was wearing the blue and white gingham dress all the girls wore. His tie wasn’t on straight.

“Touchée,” he says.

* * *

James Potter to Sirius Black: meet me with the tequila at evans’s

Sirius Black: the fuck are you doing at evans

Sirius Black: i thought i told u to stop driving past her flat at obscene hours of the day in the hopes catching her while shes getting her mail

James Potter: were baking a cake

Sirius Black: …………………………………………

Sirius Black: of all the things to happen tonight

Sirius Black: did u at least get my froyo

James Potter: yes sir

Sirius Black: excellent

Sirius Black: ill be there in five

* * *

 

They used to hang out on the fire escape outside her flat a lot when they were younger. Petunia would be fighting with her parents inside and she wanted to get out.

That fire escape, leaning against the wall, rickety, heard so many of their conversations. She wanted to know how much horse power it would take to get to the moon. He wanted to know how many days it would take before he stopped wanting to kiss her. They both came up with the same answer: a lot.

One day they were eating mandarins from the fruit bowl and taking turns spitting the pips onto Remus and Sirius, who were doing wheelies in the parking lot below.

“Can you fucking  _not_?” Sirius yelled up at them. Lily grinned like a champ. He wanted to kiss her there and then.

She had the rind curled in her hand, cradling it. She said she wanted to save it for the chickens on the farm she passed whenever she rode her bike out of town. He couldn’t believe she was saving her scraps for some chickens half an hour out of her way. It made him love her all the more.

The next day after school she was getting ready to ride down to the farm, book bag slung over her shoulders. No helmet. Two braids. Mandarin rinds from the past two weeks compiled in the front basket, half of them already going mouldy.

He had rocked up with half a packet of jammie dodgers that Sirius got to before he could stop him (he suspect he had some help from Peter, and probably Remus, too, who nicked a couple when he snuck into the teacher’s lounge for a cup of tea), two flasks of lemonade (she’d end up drinking half of his, anyway), and a moth eaten picnic blanket (that he nicked from the garage without telling his mum because he knew she wouldn’t mind).

It was starting to rain.

He said goodbye to Sirius (who was going round to Remus’s) and approached her gingerly at the school gates, bike in tow, and slung an already too-long leg over the seat. “Ready?” he asked her.

She looked up at him, shellshocked, for a moment flabbergasted that he would even suggest coming, stunned that she hadn’t realised he would (of course he would). But it only lasted for a second, and then she nodded, hopping on her own bike (the seat at least half a head lower than his) and they rode off together.

They took the track beside the overpass that took them out of town and down the country lanes, tyres crunching as the bitumen turned to gravel turned to dirt, pedalling until they reached the farm. Lily knocked on the door of the owner’s cottage and exchanged the most unfairly crafted smile (the one that could split the skies open) before sneaking into the chicken coop with the mandarin rinds.

The sun didn’t come out for the rest of the day, so they laid out the blanket underneath the big oak tree to shelter from the rain. They ate soggy jammie dodgers and drank cold lemonade even though she was starting to shiver. He gave her his jacket. She didn’t say thanks.

* * *

 

 

Now they’re in her tiny kitchen a 3:20am on Saturday night (Sunday morning) baking a Victoria Sponge.

He almost asks her “Why Victoria Sponge?”, but stops himself, because how could it be anything else? It’s been her favourite since she was five. He knows this. He just forgot.

“You got any jam?” he asks, rummaging in her fridge, which is stocked with out–of–date prunes (“A helpful laxative, Evans.” “You mind fucking off, there, James?”), half a container of mouldy margarine (he doesn’t know why, she hates margarine), and a jar of jalapeños (maybe she doesn’t find them too spicy, now, like she did when she was 11). He pulls all of them out and leaves them on the counter.

Eventually he finds what he’s looking for, a jar of farm-made raspberry jam. He checks the label. It’s from the same one they visited when they were kids. He almost wants to cry.

“There’s blackberry in the drawer, as well,’ she tells him absently, sifting flour at the benchtop.

“Then why was the raspberry in the fridge?”

“Evan doesn’t want it to get mouldy.”

“Evan?”

“My boyfriend.”

He drops the jar, catches it on reflex. “Ginge, are you shitting me? You’re dating a guy called Evan? You do realise that if he took your last name he’d be called Evan Evans, right?”

She pulls out a different frown, the one erring on the side of a pout, where she sticks her lips out, narrows her eyes and scrunches her nose. The instinct to kiss her punches in the stomach again. He hasn’t felt that since he was 13. Maybe it never really went away.

“First of all,” she starts off, “we made a pact when we were 11 that if you ever called me Ginge again I’d piss in your tea,” he smiles at the memory, how wrong it is, “and  _second_  of all, how do you know that I’d make him take my last name? Evan’s last name is Jones. That’s quite nice. I could be Lily Jones, you know.”

He holds up a finger, swipes some of the cake batter from the bowl. “Because you’d never take the name of the bloke you married just to make a point. Also, Lily Jones is a shit name.”

She mumbles something along the lines of “I’d take yours,” but the sound could easily be mistaken for the oven fan whirring in the background.

He laughs, places his finger on his tongue, sucks off the floury batter, pretends not to notice the way her eyes linger on him and widen, tries to convince himself he’s making it up.

Five minutes later Sirius rocks up with the tequila, and Lily throws her arms around him but pulls back long enough to give him a once-over, eyes scrunched with distaste. “God, just when I thought you couldn’t get any more attractive, you grow out your hair and put on ten pounds of muscle.”

Sirius grins and flexes just slightly, setting the tequila (wrapped in a brown paper bag) down on the counter, and James wants to punch him (in the most affectionate way possible).

Lily unwraps the package, raises her eyebrows at his choice of liquor, then shrugs her shoulders and takes a swig.

Sirius grins, hoisting himself up onto the counter, bangs his feet against the cupboards on purpose.

She coughs against the acridity, then laughs, the full-bodied, lovely, sunny kind of laugh. James looks at her. It's the one she used to give him when they were kids or when she was sucking up to the teacher. It gives him chills.

‘You alright, Jim?” Sirius asks him, copying his gesture from earlier by sticking his finger in the cake mix and sucking it off. At least James had the decency to wash his hands beforehand.

That’s when the door opens and a tall guy with flecky caramel-coloured hair walks in, chucking his keys on the side table, carrying two plastic bags containing much more adult things than blue hairspray and multicoloured wigs. “Babe, I’m home.” The word  _babe_  sticks in James’s throat. He cringes.

He’s not sure if Lily recoils too (it could be interpreted as more of a grimace), but she spins away from the counter, hugging Evan around the waist. Sirius is giving Lily’s boyfriend the harsh kind of once over a serial killer does their next victim, like he’s wondering if he can fit him in his closet. Evan looks mildly accosted.

“Who’s this?” he says, gesturing to the other boys. James makes a mental note to never gesture again, as the practice has just been ruined for him.

Lily opens her mouth, gapes just-so. James has a flashback to that day on the school quad. It was raining.

Once Sirius is done appraising Evan, he turns to Lily, says slowly, with the right balance of uncaringness and mild offence, “I thought I was your only boy-toy.”

Evan looks like he’s about to burst into flames.

 

* * *

He leaves in a hurry, saying that he has to go to the toilet and then to bed, and can they not make too much noise, please. Sirius stares after him with that same kind of serial-killer contemplativeness.

Lily conveniently becomes absolved in the task of baking, cracking the eggs with vague ferocity, whisking the batter like she’s trying to beat it into oblivion and setting it in the oven.

James wanders over to set his forearms on the counter, leaning towards her. If her eyes flicker to him, briefly, he pretends not to notice. “So, Evans,” he starts (Sirius snickers in the background), “what’s your boyfriend doing getting home at 3am on a Sunday morning?”

She gets quiet, the way she did when Snape rocked up in Year 5, claimed she was  _his_  best mate and said, “Mind fucking off, Potter? Thanks,” before pulling her off to the monkey bars.

She mumbles something now, about night school and how Evan’s doing a course. James has to keep switching awareness between Evans and Evan’s. He has no idea how Lily does it.

“What’s he studying?” Sirius asks idly, still on the counter, licking the batter off a beater. “Douche 101?”

“Didn’t you sign up for that course, too, Black?”

“Clever, Evans.”

“I try.”

James starts absently cleaning up the mess that Sirius is only adding to, and about fifty minutes later the sponge is cooked, iced, jammed and cut. Sirius is working on stuffing half of it in his mouth, though James knows he prefers chocolate cake, because Victoria Sponge reminds him of family events. James prefers chocolate cake too, if he’s honest, but he doesn’t mind sponge, because it reminds him of Lily.

He’s chewing on a piece when Evan wanders out, mumbling that he’s going for a run. James checks the clock. It’s 5am.

Sirius gags at the mention of a run like someone’s just suggest bathing in pig’s vomit. Evan glares and exits without another word. He’s wearing God-awful running shorts and a pedometer.

“Could he  _be_  any more of a dick?” Sirius wonders aloud. Lily ignores him, staring after Evan with a certain amount of fondness, but James can read her distaste. It’s the same look she got after she rescued a kitten and it weed all over on her new tights. He wonders if this is any different.

Sirius looks to Lily. “So, you’re dating a constipated guy who doesn’t eat real butter and is so weak that he can’t handle chillies. I wish I could say you’re winning, Evans, but sadly, you’re not.”

James chokes so hard on his piece of Victoria Sponge that they have to take him to the hospital.

* * *

He wakes up with her holding his hand.

Before she can even speak, he asks her, “Why are you dating him?”, and his voice comes out scratchy and raw, probably because the sponge was so dry that it gave him gravel rash on the way down. “He’s everything you said you never wanted to date.”

She frowns at him, but doesn’t deny it (he counts this as a win). “How do you know what I want to date?”

“We made a list,” he reminds her, mentally running through all the points, because he memorised them all in the hopes that he would fit all her criteria, one day. He learnt how to juggle for her. He spent five weeks in the garage with dad trying to teach him.  _God, he was so pathetically in love with her_.  _Is he still?_

They did everything together. Bucket lists. Runs to the corner shop for 5¢ lollies. Riding their bikes in the rain. They got sick together. They played soccer together. They grew up together. What are they doing now? Sitting in a hospital room because he choked on cake at the sight of her new boyfriend. Jesus Christ.

She’s still frowning, probably trying to remember the list. “Didn’t I want someone who was half Italian, a quarter Spanish, and a quarter English?”  _Fuck, she does remember._

“I always wondered how I was going to manage that one, being 100% Indian.” He freezes when he realises what he said.  _Fuck_.

“James?” she asks him tentatively.

He pretends to fall asleep to avoid having this conversation.

“I also don’t think the list said anything about someone being the personification of milk,” she mumbles quietly.

“Sirius’s words?” he whispers, halfway into fake-sleep.

“Sirius’s words,” she confirms.

 

* * *

She walks him home from the hospital in the later hours of Sunday morning, still early, telling him about how everyone else in the emergency room on a Saturday night (Sunday morning) was there for stomach pumps. Apparently neither she nor Sirius could tell the emergency nurse that James was in there for choking on a piece of Victoria Sponge because they were laughing so much.

“I could’ve died, Evans,” he tells her in mock-outrage, “I could’ve died choking on that piece of sponge and it would’ve been your fault.”

She ignores him, continuing her story by saying that Sirius went home because he apparently had “better things to do”, which James takes to mean that he didn’t want to miss Sunday morning cartoons. He can’t say he blames him. He’d be there too, if he could. Actually, would he? Looking down at Evans, who is lit up with the early morning sun and looking gorgeous despite the dark circles under her eyes, he isn’t so sure.

After a moment she turns serious, and it’s like someone has dragged a stormy blanket over the sky, blocking out the sun. “I’m going to break up with him,” she says.

“Who, your wanker of a boyfriend?”

She glares at him.

“You could do better,” he concedes, like he hasn’t been thinking it all along, dragging a hand through his hair. She catches the gesture and glares, which makes him grin. He knows she hates it when he does that. “It’s like Snivelly all over again,” he continues.

She ignores this last comment, and he ignores how she pales a little at the mention of his name. “Like you?” she asks, in response to the first comment.

“Yeah,” he says, laughing jokingly, because, God, there’s no way he’s ever going to be good enough for this girl, even if he was half Italian, a quarter Spanish and a quarter English. He thinks there might be some Scottish in there somewhere, and technically he’s completely English, but still. Not good enough. Never good enough.

She veers lazily on the sidewalk, changing course to walk on the curb like she always did. Always used to. She still does that? Or does she just do it because she’s with him? He doesn’t know. Either way, she’s got her arms out on either side of her for balance, one foot carefully placed in front of the other.

He’s so entranced that he almost doesn’t notice the car that comes speeding behind them, the one that’s about to hit her as she wanders along the curb.

He moves so fast his head aches.

He grabs her around the middle and pulls her shock against him, and the two of them almost careen backwards in the garden wall behind them. He feels dizzy with it, or maybe it’s just because he’s touching her for the first time since they were 13.

The car goes speeding off, with one hand out the window flipping them off, distant cries of “Wanker!” and “Fuck off!” bleeding out against the birds chirping in the trees, gone too quickly for them to be anything.

Except it’s something. Because she’s tucked against his side like she fits there perfectly, and  _fuck_ , she does, and she’s staring up at him with those gentle doe-eyes, the ones that were without spark yesterday at 3am, and  _fuck_ , he should have never left her, he should never have left her side.

“James?” she asks him.

“Yeah, pet,” he says, unable to stop the words before they are out of his mouth. He wants to kick himself, or throw up, or both. Her eyes widen. A gasp escapes her lips. He wants to kiss it back in there. He just wants to kiss her.

“I’m sorry,” he says, letting her go, but before he’s had time to react she’s thrown her arms around his middle, buried her head against his chest, and is holding him so tightly, like she’s afraid to let him go, like she’s just got him back after six years and she’s worried he’ll disappear again. If he had any thought left in his brain he would probably muse that  _this_  is how she should’ve hugged her boyfriend when he got home last night, but he’s so needlessly and hopelessly lost and found, with her arms around him, sobbing into his chest on the sidewalk just outside of the hospital carpark at 9am on a Sunday morning. It’s no longer Saturday night.

 

* * *

“I missed you,” she tells him on the phone a week later, just after he’s made a joke about Rick and Morty. He can hear her laughing and sipping tea at regular intervals on the other line. He forgot how well they fit together. He forgot how well he knew them as a whole, not just as James and Lily, but JamesandLily.

“Missed you too,” he tries to say casually, but is actually just feeling like his throat has been cut open, and he thinks it shows, because his voice wavers just slightly and he catches Remus starting at him from the couch, shaking his head like  _ohmygodyouaresuchafuck_.

“Is Remus eating jammie dodgers with his tea?” she asks suddenly, mostly because she hasn’t stopped asking questions about Remus since James told him he was in the room, and she demanded to speak to him. After they had a five minute conversation he felt the familiar jealous feeling he got after Frank Longbottom brought his labrador into class in Year 5 and Lily paid more attention to it than him. Back then he started drinking the water from Alice Forestcue’s fish bowl just to make a scene (the only reason Alice didn’t notice was because she was too busy staring at Frank). Today, however, he just ended up stealing the phone back from Remus.

“You remember—“ she starts off, and he finishes the sentence for her.

“How Remus used to sneak into the staff room every recess for a cup of tea and a bitch with Pince? Yeah, I remember,” he says, and Remus glares.

“Yeah,” she says, trailing off in that awkward and yet totally comfortable way you do when someone steals the words out of your mouth, like you have nothing else to say.

“Yeah,” he repeats back to her, because he’s an idiot.

“ _Ohmygodyou’resuchafuck!_ ” she yells distantly, echoing Remus’s earlier expression. He doesn’t think she’s talking to him anymore.

“Sorry, Evan’s just brought home coffees and says he ran into Luke Pritchard at the coffee shop! I’ve to go, I’ll talk to you later—“ she says, and hangs up before she’s even finished her sentence.

There’s silence in the flat, except for the  _tick-tick-tick_  of Pete’s  _Hello Kitty_  clock. Sirius is leaning against the doorway, sipping his coffee.

“Either he was lying, or Evans just really wanted to stop talking to you,” he says.

“What makes you say that?” James asks, only mildly offended.

Sirius shrugs and says, “Luke Pritchard doesn’t even live in London anymore,” and leaves.

* * *

 

He has a dream that night about the worst day of all their collective lives, the day he lost her. They’re standing in a courtyard in the pouring rain and it’s the last day of school, and Snivelly’s just dropped the bomb that he’s going to the local state school with Lily instead of fucking off like a normal person, and Avery makes a suggestive comment about how James won’t be able to go sticking his dick anywhere near Evans from the wankery public school the rest of them are going to, and it doesn’t matter anyway, because Snape’s going to do it for him.

James is holding Sirius back while swallowing what feels like all the bile in the world. Meanwhile Lily’s just standing off to the side, hair in rats’ tails, looking like she can’t breathe much, like she doesn’t really want to.

Remus is staring down all the other boys, already ten inches taller than the rest of them. The other boys used to call themselves the “snake gang”. It was a shit name. It still is a shit name. “It’s because they’re such slippery little fucks,” Sirius used to say, and only James could recognise how weak the insult came out from his lips, because 1) Sirius knew he missed out on that gang by a hair’s breadth, he could’ve been one of them, and that terrified him, and 2) his little brother was two years away from joining them, and that terrified him more.

They’re all standing around in the rain, and Lily—fiery Lily, who called him a dick the other day in art class because he accidentally drank his paint water—is not saying anything, and he doesn’t know why.

Anyway, McGonagall came out with her soccer whistle and starts herding them all like sheep, and they went one way, and Lily and the boys went the other.

In the dream, he tries to run after her, but he can’t, because his shoes are stuck to the pavement, and he tries to call out to her, but he can’t, because his tie is choking him. He can’t see her, because his glasses are fogging up with the rain, and the last thing he remembers is a blurry red flame being dragged off into the dark.

He wakes up at 3am on Sunday night (Monday morning), sweaty and thirsty and gasping for breath.

* * *

“Why didn’t you say anything, that day?” he asks her. They’re lying on the roof of her building while a party’s going on in her flat downstairs, which they’re technically meant to be hosting. James only suggested it as a way to piss off Evan, and Lily knows this, which is mainly why she agreed. But neither of them particularly wanted to be there, so Lily grabbed a face mask from Lush she was keeping in the fridge and the last bottle of cheap Merlot Sirius bought at the service station. (Technically the service station doesn’t sell liquor, but if you tell Marty, the guy who owns the place, that you’ve “got a cat that needs rustling” and slip him a fiver, he’ll give you whatever alcohol he’s got in his car, which is usually cheap wine and almost always tastes like absolute shit.)

She looks at him now, the fact that she’s slathered in  _Catastrophe Cosmetic_  and smelling like blueberries only slightly detracting from her wide eyes and parted lips, the top one of which is lost beneath a thick layer of chunky blue mask.

She turns away to look at the stars, and he wants to hold her hand.

She answers his question. “Because I knew I was going to have to spend the next few years with those boys and I didn’t want it to be utterly awful.”

He takes the fact that none of them were in the servo with her on that Saturday night (Sunday morning) as proof that something changed. “What happened?”

She smiles (not at him. He digs his fingernails into his palms to stop himself from being a bitter fuck). “I got some real friends, and stopped giving a shit.”

“Those sound like good friends,” he comments (again, a little bitter that they aren’t him).

“They are,” she says, looking a little despairing. “Were,” she amends.

“What happened?” he asks again, wanting to take a sip of Merlot but knowing that he can’t unless he wants to spill half of it down his  _Star Wars_  t-shirt. He knows that she’d laugh at him if he did, and he knows that he’d do anything to make her laugh, even make a complete prat of himself, which is nothing new.

In this universe (not the one where he spills the Merlot and she laughs), she tells him, “Marlene went to play soccer in Manchester, Mary was studying here for a while but went back to Bristol when her Mum got sick, Alice and Frank—you remember how cute they were?—got married and moved in together, but they’re living in Brighton, last I heard.”

He sighs and pulls out a lighter and a mangy cigarette. “Smoke?” he asks her.

She looks at him, shakes her head. “Don’t fancy lung cancer, thanks very much, though I’m surprised your mum hasn’t killed you already for smoking those things.”

He grins, shakes his head at her, remembering her sitting on the kitchen counter in his house making cookies with his mum. And then he turns bitter, because this is the bit they missed out on—teenage rebellion, smoking behind the bike shed because they didn’t know what was good for them, burning a dick onto the playing field of the rival boys’ school, getting properly shitfaced for the first time, his sloppy first kiss with a girl he didn’t know at a party hosted by one of the boys’ in Sixth Form, who only invited him because they were on the cricket team together.

She’d probably turn her nose up at all that, though, come up with better pranks, better laughs, remind him that she was actually his first kiss, when they were five, after he gave her two dollars to buy a cookie from the canteen.

“Anyway,” she says, but he’s not listening, because he’s only just realised that if he leant up on his elbow to take a swig of Merlot, he’d be in the perfect position to kiss her. He doesn’t even care that she’s got blueberries on her lip.

“There you are—“ Evan says, busting through the stairwell door and screaming when he sees Lily’s face, which makes them both laugh so hard that their face masks crack.

* * *

She shows up at their door a week later with a box in her hands, and he doesn’t even need to ask to know what’s happened.

“Finally ditched your wanker of a boyfriend, then?” Sirius asks, already halfway into his third glass of scotch.

She just tells him to fuck off, flopping down on the couch to watch The Great British Bake Off with Remus.

“Where's the rest of your stuff?” James asks her.

“My car,” she says, not taking her eyes of the screen.

“Do you… want us to go get it for you?”

“Yes please,” she says, chucking him her keys. Neither she nor Remus make any effort to move, laughing as they watch Mary Berry inspect a particularly soggy blueberry tart.

He just rolls his eyes, but his lips twitch, secretly very glad that she’s here, and gestures to Sirius, who glares, but puts his glass of scotch down on the counter and follows.

Half an hour later, most of her stuff is in the living room or on the landing, and she sleeps on the couch that night while they figure out a permanent place for her to stay.

When he wanders out at 3am for a glass of water he isn’t surprised to find her still awake, looking at him. The moonlight is streaming through the window that they’re yet to get curtains for, and suddenly he’s 11 years old, looking back at her as they’re sprawled out across his bed in the middle of the night.

“Alright, Evans?” he asks her now, softly, leaning back against the counter and sipping his water. She gives him a half-smile from where the covers are tucked up to her chin.

For a second he thinks about that day in the quad, wonders—not for the first time—what it would’ve been like if he’d interfered, if she’d come to public school with them, if it hadn’t been raining.

They’re having one of those moments, he realises— that they used to have all the time, then stopped having, are starting to have again— where they know exactly what the other is thinking.

“I’m sorry,” she tells him, smile gone like the moon, tucked behind a cloud.

He wanders over to her, tucks a stray piece of hair behind her ear. “Don’t be.”

* * *

The next day they all go out to eat at a 24-hour diner, holing up in the corner booth and ordering obscene amounts of breakfast food (scrambled eggs for James, waffles for Sirius, bacon for Peter, a massive stack of pancakes for Lily and toast with marmalade for Remus).

James is trying to ignore the fact that this is how it always should’ve been, all five of them together, but it doesn’t matter, because this is them  _now_.

“We should piss in his shoes,” Peter says about Evan, because they’ve been dreaming up revenge tactics, and now that Lily’s not fucking him anymore, she’s more than happy to join in.

“Cut his brake lines,” Remus suggests idly, like it’s on-par with pissing in somebody’s shoes and not something that could result in death.

“Glue all his furniture to the ceiling,” Lily says, opting for her usual style of demure, less likely to attract police attention, and unbelievably irksome for the victim.

“We did that one in Year 5,” Sirius points out, “get some original ideas, Evans.”

She throws a piece of Pete’s bacon at him, which Sirius catches in his mouth, grinning. “Prick,” she mutters.

After about fifteen minutes they’ve spread out to more than one table, Remus reading the paper with his feet up on the chair in front of him, Sirius and Peter sharing a table and seeing how many sugar packets they can tear open before the waitress asks them to leave.

James turns to Lily, who’s on her fourth cup of tea.

“What happened?” he asks her. “With Snape?”

She gives him a look like,  _you know_. But he wants to hear her say it.

He wants to know why it still feels like she walked away from him all those years ago. He wants to know. Wants to see if he can hold it. It’s one step closer to holding her.

“He kept treating me like…” she starts, eyes glazing over. He can see the tea in her cup start to waver, and that’s when he notices her hands are shaking. He reaches out to steady her, his hands dwarfing hers in size. When they were 11 their palms were the exact same width. They measured.

“There was one day on the quad, and I didn’t want it to be a big scene…” He’s already picturing it. She keeps talking. “He wasn’t having any of it. Kept saying stuff like how he wouldn’t let me…” She trails off again, tries to take a sip of tea, coughs as it goes down. He runs a thumb over her knuckles.

“I’m sorry,” he tells her, because he is, he truly, truly is; sorry he wasn’t there, sorry he didn’t punch Snivelly’s teeth down his throat when he had the chance, sorry he wasn’t there to stand up for her. He wanted to be there for her. He still does.

When he tells her as much, she shakes her head. “No,” she says. “If you had been there, it would’ve felt like...” She trails off, and he finishes for her, because that is what they do now.

“I did it for you, I know.”

She smiles at him sadly, the kind of hopeless  _what can you do?_  expression that makes him want to go back in time and fix everything for her even though she just told him not to.

“I  _had_  to do it by myself. I had to  _see_  it for myself, you know?” He knows. She had to see that he was beyond her help. She had to see that her love can’t save people. Sometimes they don’t want to be saved. Sometimes they don’t  _deserve_  to be saved.

“Because I  _feel_  the way I do—about people,” she says, swallowing, doing the hair tuck, “I think I needed to get to a point where I had to do it on my own. And if you had done it for me, I…”

“I know, Lil. I know.” He gives her a smile, not a grin, without teeth, just a twitch of the lips. She’s looking at him like she wants to kiss him and he knows he’s not imagining it this time. He knows, because she leans across the table, so slowly, and presses the gentlest of kisses to the outside of his lips, right where it quirked up in the corner just a moment ago. It’s so soft and unexpected. That’s a childhood kiss, he thinks. That’s Wendy giving the thimble to Peter. It’s Vada and Thomas, Forrest and Jenny, Juli and Bryce. It’s full of everything. It’s the way she would’ve kissed him if they were still 13. Though, to be fair, if they were still thirteen, she wouldn’t have kissed him at all.

“I wish you’d been my first.” Kiss, he means. He’s thinking of himself at that party, holding that girl and pretending it was her.

She looks at him, genuinely surprised. “I was, don’t you remember?” He doesn’t. “We were five, and you gave me two dollars after Petunia took mine to get a vanilla ice cream cup from the canteen. You told me to go get myself a cookie and I kissed you.”

He feels genuinely shellshocked for one long moment, ignoring Sirius who belatedly yells out for them to get a room, wincing as Remus kicks swings his legs off the chair to kick him in the shin, as Lily flips him off without looking. He completely forgot. He forgot Lily kissing him on the cheek, all bad breath and knobbly knees and hair that hadn’t been brushed. He remembers thinking that she was the best thing he’d ever seen. He remembers thinking that he would win the sprints on Sports Day just for her. He remembers thinking that he wanted to marry this girl when he grew up.

Now he’s a little older, and a little wiser, though not by much.

“I can’t believe I forgot,” he tells her, earnestly.

She smiles, shrugs self-assuredly, leans back in her chair. “Well,” she says, “I was always smarter than you.”

 _Yes,_  he thinks,  _you always were._


End file.
